Unofficial news and tips about Google

May 3, 2007

Monitor Network Connections

URL Snooper is a free Windows software that lets you monitor your network connections and see the addresses of all the files that are downloaded to your computer and all the addresses from HTML files.

The program was created to identify the URLs of audio/video streams. "Many links to streaming audio and video that you come across on the web are hidden behind JavaScript or ActiveX scripts. Because of this, it is sometimes very difficult to figure out the actual URLs that correspond to the streams being played."

But the software is also useful if you want to see the files downloaded by a program you've just installed. Or if you're wondering why Google Desktop needs an Internet connection. You can see in the screenshot above that Google Desktop connects to google.com to read a list of localized domains, the files for the Safe Browsing feature and to download information necessary for the gadgets (weather, news, etc.).

1 comment:

I just started using Network traffic monitor after noticing the talking computers in the taskbar where always lit up. Using this program, I found out what process was doing the talking, and the IP and hostname of where it was going.